The Kingdom of Little Wounds (17 page)

During conversation, Nicolas acquits himself admirably. He pretends not to hear the thunder coming from the royal belly, and he leaves his pomander in his breast. To do otherwise would be the worst breach of respect to the King.

And he is a discreet listener, not intruding his own opinions while the King considers the weighty questions of the court. First: What is to be done with the Countess of Belnát and her lover? Orders must be given if order is to be restored.

“No torture,” Christian decides. He doesn’t like to imagine his former friend Georg, or even the fish-cold Countess, writhing with the rack or the screws, though he supposes it might come to that. “Not now.”

Nicolas removes a handkerchief from his sleeve and offers it to Christian, who discovers his brow has beaded with sweat. “Wise enough, Your Majesty. With some people, the worst criminals and cowards, an apparent and temporary clemency achieves greater effects than immediate action.”

Christian accepts the handkerchief, grits his teeth, feels awful. He can’t remember ever experiencing such pain. But this is just a recurrence of his old trouble — he knows he has not been poisoned, and certainly not by Elinor or Georg. Christian eats nothing that the tasters do not try first. Still he cannot summon a word to say next.

Nicolas speaks on smoothly, as if responding to a question. “The arrests were magnificently played, Your Majesty. Sir Georg had just docked after an excursion into the city; your guards took him as he stepped onto the pier. The Countess, meanwhile, was amusing herself by the witch’s hollow. The cathedral clock struck six, and they were apprehended at the same stroke.”

“Not together, then.” Christian mops his own brow. “Not . . .
in flagrante.
”

“No, Majesty, they have been clever about not appearing together.” Nicolas keeps his voice neutral. He steps to the table to pour out a cup of wine, adding measures of the anise juice and horehound that Candenzius has prescribed for the King’s dyspepsia. The spoon clinks against the cup’s glass sides; the mixture smells overpoweringly sweet. “Georg was alone except for his servants, and Elinor was with the Queen and some of the nursemaids.”

The Queen. His wife, excitable in her delicate condition. Christian groans as another pain rips through him. “How did Isabel take it?” He tries to sound no more concerned than if asking how she took her latest dose of blood-strengthening medicine.

“She was dismayed, but she recognizes Your Majesty’s wisdom in this, as in all matters. Naturally she appreciates your protection. As she appreciated the book of saints’ lives you gave her yesterday.” Nicolas hands the cup to Christian, careful to keep his fingers from brushing the King’s disrespectfully.

In fact, once Elinor was well and truly gone, the Queen fell into a fit, clawing at her own hair and ears until they bled. All three physicians and her priest, Father Absolon, are with her now. But this is not the moment to share such a report with the King, who needs to feel confident in his own bold action. An action toward which Nicolas, in fact, did subtly guide him.

“Very well, then.” Slowly Christian empties his medicinal cup, stares at Nicolas’s nose, and thinks how fine the nostrils are, like two delicate pinpricks. It is odd, this intimacy between the two of them; for the first time, Christian feels embarrassed to be upon the stool when speaking, but nonetheless he can’t imagine being there with anyone else. “We have removed a canker from the court.”

He makes a gesture to show Nicolas that, for the moment, he would prefer not to speak. Nicolas is sensitive enough to understand, but in his silence there is little companionship, only an inscrutable mystery, a sense of withholding. He keeps his own counsel while the anise and horehound do their work and the new-fashioned second hand ticks its way around the chamber clock that Nicolas gave him.

How lonely I am,
thinks the King. Then scolds himself for self-indulgence.

He counts out five minutes, ten, fifteen, punctuated by ever milder outbursts from his gut. He wonders incidentally when and how this custom was established, this keeping watch over a sovereign during his evacuations. Perhaps at some time in the past it was a service performed by a physician, who monitored the king’s health by inspecting what was left behind. Or a warrior, who would protect the king at his most vulnerable moment, so he might not die on his stool like the biblical King Eglon, whose stomach was rent by a sword that disappeared in his folds of fat . . .

Christian’s limbs grow eager for movement. He stands and holds up his shirt to let Nicolas finish him with a sponge upon a stick. “So,” he says while this happens, “soon there will be a new official secretary.” He supposes his wife will want someone for her chief lady too. “There must also be a Mistress — or Master — of the Nursery. My council will have some suggestions . . . I’ll want your opinion as well,” he adds as grandly as he can. “And perhaps more than that. I believe . . . I suspect you are clever with secrets.”

Nicolas bows but stays silent. His dark face composed, his ruby ring pulsing as he busies himself with the sponge and a little pot of vinegar to rinse it in.

“You have thus far resisted marriage, I believe?” Christian wants to confirm.

“Yes, Your Majesty. I was betrothed once, but the lady died.”

“It’s just as well.” Christian waits, tense, while Nicolas dries him with a linen towel. “Women do tend to gossip.”

Nicolas murmurs polite agreement.

I am evil. At least, on the path to evil. While scheming to save myself, I have sinned and must do penance. It’s useless to say, even to myself, that I didn’t mean any harm — I merely told the story of Countess Elinor’s adultery to satisfy Lord Nicolas lest he punish me again. I never thought she’d be accused of murder, only of wantonness.

So I make myself into an avid scrubber of nursery floors, brusher of walls, huntress of lice and bedbugs. That night, with the children in their sleeping chambers, I rub the cracks of their grandly carved daytime beds with turpentine to drive away infestations, polish them to keep the painted wood fine — things I used to do at my father’s house, but unusual for even a somewhat-honored maid on a night in which the Mistress is missing. Five white wooden swans, one yellow lion, all cleansed of pests, with wormwood scattered down inside to slow the insects that creep up from the floor. No one will accuse a clean girl of lying.

The paradox is that thanks to my own efforts, there is no Mistress of the Nursery to notice what I do now. In Countess Elinor’s absence, Duchess Margrethe of Marsvin has stepped in to oversee the royal children’s households; but she is so old that, for her, to step in is to occupy a cushioned chair in the corner farthest from the window. She dozes in peace while the machinery of nurses, maids, and other attendants wheels around her.

The nighttime nurses don’t notice me, either; they are too busy with the children. The Crown Prince and his sisters are agitated in spirit — fretful and crying out. Hungry, thirsty, tearful, itchy, with a burning in their stomachs and blisters in their mouths. Their limbs hurt, and each one of them has a soft new wound, gummy with white sap. They sob for their mother and for the Countess. Little Gorma also calls for Midi Sorte, who cannot be found here or in the dorter.

“Theriac,” Candenzius pronounces, and the physicians go from room to room to dose them all with his brew of sixty-four ingredients. It has a base of Egyptian viper’s milk and is the most efficient known antidote to poison. Candenzius often prescribes it “on principle.”

While the physicians deliver the theriac, the nurses stand with basins and towels in case it comes back up.

One of the older women mumbles, in that way inaudible to the nobility, “Snake milk and sugar, my arse. What they need is a good lot of thistle to drain their bowels.”

The new stuff smells good, at least, of that throaty spice called cinnamon. My mouth waters as if I could use an antidote myself. But I don’t want to drink viper’s milk . . .

I scrub harder, punishing myself with the odor of turpentine.

While the Duchess dozes, while the nurses bustle, while the cathedral clock chimes its slow way through the hours, everyone waits for the Queen. She is said to be resting, or rather weeping, in her chambers, where Doctor Candenzius attends her when he leaves the nursery. No doubt she is bereft at the loss of her friend, betrayed by what she believes that friend has done. Or perhaps she does not believe; maybe she will order an investigation of the rumor . . .

I scrub and oil, hunt and crush, trying to craft myself a good reputation. And here is another of those paradoxes, not so minor: I who was nearly ruined by gossip have now ruined another woman by the same means. I can’t help but imagine the prison — colder and nastier than that cell in which Lord Nicolas first put me, darker and smellier, tanging of torture’s irons and blood. The King’s Lower Chambers. Countess Elinor was no gracious mistress, but has she deserved what I’ve done?

I was only trying to avoid doing . . .
that
. . . again to Lord Nicolas. And so I lied.

All at once I abandon my work, to fly to the cellar where Lord Nicolas has his cabinet. I stumble through the vats and storerooms, some now packed with supplies, others emptied. Barley, wheat, beans, onions, the scurry of rats and mice. I run through the whole long series of compartments, only to come out at the far stairway without having found Nicolas or even catching a whiff of his too-perfumed scent.

He has moved on.

I collapse against the cold stone stairs. I sob. Not that I could imagine what to say if I did find him — how to explain that what I told him before was the invention of a moment, meant only to save myself and not to harm another. I don’t understand how the gossip about adultery could turn to accusations of poisoning, yet I am sure I’m to blame. Another sin.

I can’t even admit to him (and barely to myself) that the danger I faced was not so bad — certainly nothing to compare with what Countess Elinor faces now.

It is there, as I huddle against the cold steps, that she finds me.

At first I’m aware only of feet on the stairs, the gritty scrape of a shoe and the swish of linsey-woolsey skirts. The figure stops but says nothing; she could be a ghost. Thus, though the place is dark, I realize that my companion is Midi Sorte. But I don’t look up.

In her eerie quiet, Midi plucks at my sleeve, then grabs hold of my wrist and tugs me upward.

“You want me to follow you?” I say stupidly, wondering if she might make some small voice noise of assent.

After all these weeks, I still find her silence and the thought of that forked tongue unnerving. But I realize suddenly that I don’t want Midi to make a noise — if she opens her lips, the two long halves of that tongue might wind outward toward me in the dark. I imagine them wrapping around my throat and knotting tight, pulling me to Midi’s sharp white teeth.

(Does she have sharp white teeth? I can’t remember. I may be thinking of Nicolas’s.)

I shake myself to restore my senses. I shake off Midi Sorte’s hand, too. But because she is in some sense my superior, and because I don’t know what else I am to do at this horrible time, I follow her up the stairs.

Midi leads me up into the courtyard, behind the sentries, and across to the southernmost of the palace buildings, one that is plain but not so plain as that which houses the aprons’ dorter. Inside, Midi chooses a door very like other doors and opens it without knocking. It is heavy and silent on oiled hinges. We step in.

There is a desk, a shelf of books, a bed with faded greenish drapes. An open window by which a man has arranged himself against the pale summer night sky as if to show his profile to best advantage. He appears to be reading a map or some such document by moon- and candlelight.

If I hoped for a moment that this would be Lord Nicolas’s new cabinet, I am disappointed. Not only are the furnishings much too plain, but the occupant’s nose is too thick; the brow is too long, the beard too full, the man himself too tall. Bony and loose limbed. A stranger.

Midi latches the door and stands in front of it, eyes on this man.

He detaches himself from the window and steps toward the candles on the table. Now I recognize him, dimly, as someone I have seen on the fringes of events. He wears a scholar’s black robe and usually, I believe, carries a tablet and stylus.

I wonder if a scholar can be an apron wearer’s enemy or if enemies are only for those of high station.

He speaks. “Ava Bingen” — so he knows my true name, not the Mariasdatter I took on with the buckets and brushes —“Health to your soul. I am Arthur Grammaticus.”

He pauses as if this collection of syllables should mean something, but I am too confused to make a reply.

He explains: “Keeper of the King’s chronicles.”

I give him a curtsy in case this post is one of some importance. I’m not quite sure what chronicles are, if they are kept in this chamber. “Health to your soul,” I say.

Arthur Grammaticus seats himself in one of the chairs and gestures as if to invite me to sit too, but I will not take a chair while Midi stands.